Affiliate Tracking Software Demo: May 6, 2014

Today, we’ll go through an affiliate tracking software demo of our product LeadDyno. We will show you how to ramp up and track your affiliate traffic and sales. And we will get into tracking the ROI of some of our online marketing spend as well, such as Google AdWords.

What I’m going to demo for you here is a live LeadDyno account that we’ve got hooked up with our other company that I mentioned, which is a software company that we sell to small business, so we do most of our marketing behind line and then through referrals. So, walk you through that here.

So, I guess first things first, take a quick note to say, yeah, each set up is a little different. We do our best to have one-click integrations or easy integrations for as many e-commerce and merchant solutions as we can.

What we’re looking at here, basically once LeadDyno is in, you’ll be able to track literally each click and then the source of that click. So, I’ve got my new leads coming in, so I’ll just go through the terminology real quick.

Lead is going to be someone who we’ve got an email address for. So, they put in their email address, so that could be in the context of a sale or it could be that they signed up for our free newsletter or in our case here if you signed up for our webinar, but not yet for the free trial, we would then have you as a Lead.

And then a Purchase, of course, is someone who purchases from you, purchases your product. So either from your e-commerce store or after your free trial period is over. Again, in LeadDyno’s case, after our 14-day free trial period is over, people stay with us and that flips to a Purch.

Let me show you what the leads coming in look like. The way LeadDyno works is we do install on your site and then we do track the source of every click, every lead so that we’re able to see not only people who come through affiliate traffic, but also from somewhere else.

For example, this person here came to our site from this article and then I can go to the link and I can see what it was. So, this was actually a blog post where our product was mentioned, featured. Then we actually do track all of it in LeadDyno, so we give you the breakdown in terms of referral statistics. So, how many visits, how many leads, and how many purchases or new customers that you actually got from this source.

Everything’s being tracked, not only affiliate side. That said, let’s get into how to ramp up affiliates and how to get them up and going as quickly as possible. So, we do have a site for you that we’re going to host and this is after you sign up with us. So, if you check out your settings menu and then general account info, we’re going to have that domain for you. We call it your affiliate home page. And that’s going to be your domain.leaddyno.com.

An example of that is that’s going to look like this guy here, where you can send affiliates if they’re not yet affiliates of your product, they can sign up on the left. If they already are, they can log in on the right. I actually have a quicker way for them to log in and I’ll show you that in a few minutes here. But I’d say that the easiest way to get affiliates to enter your program, just give them this link. You can link to this.

As I said, we’ve got this hosted for you. You do have the ability to customize this as we have. So, you’ll see we got a couple of different looks. Here’s another one of our users who is running a Shopify store and so they’ve done some customization with their header. They put up the logo and such.

I’ll show you how to customize the look and feel of both the affiliate website and then the affiliate dashboard in a minute. The quickest way to get affiliates going, this would probably be the quickest, is just send them to your affiliate home page. They can just sign up and then they’ll be off and running.

A couple of other options for you under the Tools. So, Settings leads down to Tools. We’ve got an affiliate invitation form. This is something that you can add on your site as well. So we’ve got code here for you so you can basically just copy that code, or you can email it over to your webmaster, your web person, your developer and put this on your site and this will then take in the affiliates. They enter their email and they’re up and running.

Then the third way to do it, of course you can do it through the admin console here. So, under Affiliate Program, you can create a new affiliate. This is something I will do for our higher end resellers if I’m just talking to somebody on the phone. Yeah, I’ll just sign them up on the fly real quick, just to make sure that they’re up and running. You just enter their name, their email address, and they are up and going.

So, from here, these are the quick ways to get people in to your program. Now, to ramp them up the first thing that I like to have people do is to go under the Automated Affiliate Emails. And this is under Affiliate Content. Automated Affiliate Emails. And we’ve got a few emails that we can kick off based on certain events. So, the first one here is on an affiliate sign up. So, this is when somebody signs up. What we can do is we can fire off an email from you that basically gives them all the info they need regarding your affiliate program.

So, we’ve got their unique referral link in here. That’s going to be this little variable. We also can link to their affiliate dashboards. That’s where they get all this. Everything that they ever need is in their affiliate dashboards. That’s where all the one-click social sharing stuff is, that’s where they can grab banner ads and such.

So, you can put all this in your welcome email. All you really need to do to get this going is you just come in and click it to Enable. Click Save in the upper right and then you can edit the copy of the email and of the subject line as well to suit your needs. If you need help with this, just let me know. I’m happy to give you some of the stuff that we use in terms of copy.

That’s going to be the quickest way to get people up and going. So, what they’re going to get when they get into your program. Let me know you what their referral link is going to look like. I’m going to show you one of our resellers who I’ve set up with an affiliate code.

So, Lori here came to us. She’s a reseller in our industry and wanted to resell our product as part of her offering. People often ask, “How do you determine what commission you’re going to set people up with?” We have them split up into tiers and this some that you can do in LeadDyno pretty easily. I have them split up between affiliates where they get a one-time commission and then our resellers get a recurring commission based off our recurring sales. That works well for us. I always tell people, given how much you want to spend to acquire a customer, that’s where you want to put your affiliate commission at.

So, Lori here, she signs up and then I gave her an affiliate link with her company name at the end of it. So, it kind of looks like a co-branded link. To do that, you’re just going to edit the affiliate code field here and that’s going to give your affiliate a branded link. You can do this either when you create a new affiliate, or if you’ve already got someone in the system, you come in you can put in an affiliate code for them and that’s going to give them a link that looks like that.

The other link that I mentioned in that welcome email is going to be linked to the affiliate dashboard. So, that’s a one-click that’s going to take the affiliate in through the web site which we showed on the front end. Then that takes them in to the dashboard. So, again, this is customizable to look and feel of your affiliate web site and this is where she has everything that she needs.

This affiliate code here can also double as a discount code. So, for our Shopify and for our Big Commerce users, this can also double as a discount code. We will automatically match this when it comes in from Big Commerce or when it comes in from Shopify. And we’ll credit the affiliate that we have a code match for. So, this is an option as well and we do have a lot of our e-commerce people using the affiliate code also as a discount code. I let you know that that’s already set up. All you need to do on LeadDyno is just give them that code and you’re good to go.

For Lori, whenever somebody clicks through her referral link this is what she can post on her web site. She can use this via email and such. So, she’s going to get credit for the people coming through. We’re keeping track in real time. So, affiliates are going to be able to see this as people come in and they’ll be able to see the number of visits, the number of leads that they have credit for and also the number of purchases. Then the commissions also we update in real time as well. She’ll be able to see what’s due now, what’s upcoming, and then what’s paid.

Let me just explain, when something is upcoming, if you have your commission plan set to pay maybe not immediately, but after a few months, so if you’re protecting yourself fro refunds, which is something that we do by the way, we would always pay just a few months out to make sure that we’re staying ahead in terms of potential refunds or even any potential issues with affiliates.

We do register the commission right away, but we put it as Upcoming. Then when it flips to being Due because that number of months have passed, that’s when we flip that over. I will walk you through how we do the commission pay out a little bit, in a few minutes here as well.

One of the most useful things in the affiliate dashboard for an affiliate like Lori is she can come in and she can share the link. So this is where our one-click social sharing is found. So she can share the link via email. Basically, she just clicks the email button. We send out an email on her behalf and we’ve already got some prewritten copy here for you. I will show you where you can update this copy.

All you really need to do is put in the link that you want people to click to and then LeadDyno puts in the affiliate portion. So, that’s kind of the same for all the affiliate dashboards. You just put in the URL that you want these clicks to go to. LeadDyno appends the affiliate portion for your affiliate. So, in this case, Lori can come in, she can just enter a few email addresses, click send and then we send out the email on her behalf.

She can edit the email if she would like. She doesn’t have to. We gear all this to minimize the thought and the work that the affiliate has to do. Same with Twitter. Just click Twitter and this will post this Tweet. This is a Tweet that I wrote. Then it appends as I mentioned, her affiliate link here.

Same deal with Facebook. We’ll show you that. You can post this to Facebook and then this is going to have copy. Again, this is copy that I myself wrote and then appends her affiliate link here. So, Lori comes in and it’s really easy for her to share. She can add comments if she would like and then she’s off and running.

I’ll close out that window. Let me get back to the affiliate dashboard quickly here. Also, in here is where Lori can grab for her web site marketing materials such as banner ads. These all have her affiliate link in here. So here’s where banner ads are going to be. Basically she just copies the HTML and can paste that to her guy or can hand that off to her web person. So, we’ve got a bunch of banners in here. So, this is where the banners are going to be stored.

One question we do get quite often is can she point people to other pages or product pages on our domain or other subdomains. She can do that here under SubIDs tab and basically just gives the link a name and just points it to any URL on our site is fine. So if you have a specific product page, this is where you would do that. Create the link and then it’s basically going to spit out an affiliate link for her here. Then she’s still going to get credit for that. Then we do split it out in terms of the sales funnel for each link.

An option because she is a higher level reseller, we do allow her and other higher level resellers to add leads to the email address, so this is an option. It’s actually a setting on the affiliate type. And we’ll cover that in a minute. Actually, let’s cover that now.

So, I showed you the affiliate dashboard where this one-click stuff comes from such as the email. So, let’s go into how to customize this whole thing. And that is going to be under affiliate content. You can kind of just basically work your way down here and actually we’ll do that now. Once you get LeadDyno installed, this is the next thing that I would recommend that people work on next is just kind of working your way down the affiliate content.

Now, you’re cool to start as we open with ramping up affiliates. Here’s where you can customize everything. So under the affiliate web site this is where you can put your logo. You can do that here. You can put in the color. We do support a custom CSS file, so you’re welcome to do that, also iFrame. You can actually iFrame the affiliate web site into your own websites. So, if you don’t want to point them to your domain at LeadDyno.com, you can just iFrame that in. The SubIDs is what I talked about in terms of specific links and then if you have a multi-tier program, this will allow the parent affiliates to see their children affiliates.

Okay, question, “Can you restrict affiliates from seeing the email addresses of leads?”

Yeah, by default we do restrict that. So, we don’t display the email addresses of the leads to the affiliates. In the example that I showed you here, if I still have it open, these are actually leads that Lori entered herself. These are not actual leads that were captured. So, by default we do restrict that. We only show basically, this. Because she’s a higher level reseller I gave her the ability to add leads and those were leads that she entered. But otherwise she would not see the email addresses of people that she referred. We just show the numbers and then we show the commissions.

Okay, under the affiliate dashboard, this is where you can update the instructions. There’s just kind of the next tab down. And you just kind of work your way down here, but this is where you can update the instructions for your affiliate program.

Content Library is where you’re going to be able to do the things that I showed you in terms of the one-click, the sharing with email. So, if you want to update that email that I showed you, you just kind of come into the primary email. And then we’ve got editors in here. Pretty easy to use. They’re kind of what-you-see-is-what-you-get type deals. Just like typing up an email. So you put in your subject line and type your email. And as I mentioned, just put in the target domain that you want this to go to and then LeadDyno’s going to take care of appending the affiliate portion for you.

The Content Library is where you’re going to be able to do all the one-click email sharing, social media sharing, and also the banner ads. This is where you can upload those guys, too. So if you ever want to add content, if you ever want to add a banner ad, you can do that here. If you want multiple Facebook posts, we can do that too. You just add the Facebook post or add the Tweets here and that will get you some other options here as well.

Okay the Automated Affiliate emails. I showed you the first one. Let’s kind of circle back on this then I’ll kind of walk you through the others that we’ve got here. We do have a weekly status email that can go out. This will go out on the weekend. It will tell the affiliate how they did for the week, gives them their updates. This is something very popular with affiliates. I’ve never heard from an affiliate that we communicate with them too much. That’s a big advantage I think of LeadDyno, you’re always keeping them in the loop, letting them know where they’re at.

Then we also do have success-based stuff in terms of if they send you a new lead, if they send you a new purchase. Then it gets to your question about keeping the lead private or not. If you want to share the lead with them, you can do that with an email like this. So, we can say “Thank your for sharing Chrometa with your colleagues.” You can name them in the email if you’d like. If you don’t want to do that you can just take out that variable and you can say “We got your new referral.”

Again, you can update this and we’ve got some new options here too, so you want to put in the person’s first name, last name, or email address, you can do that too.

Then on the New Commission, which is probably the most popular email that people get, that is this guy here and then that’s going to be, what that would look like. So, it would say, “Hey Brett, thanks for referring your colleague here. They signed up.” And oh, by the way, and we do this in all of our emails, you know we like to refer them back to that affiliate dashboard since that’s kind of the mother ship of where everything that they have is going on.

So, the automated emails are great because they’ll just fire out on their own. You don’t have to do it and as an affiliate manager or marketing manager, you just kind of sit back and fill the replies and it’s a really good way to engage your highest performers because they’re the ones that are getting these emails all the time.

Then of course, the most popular way to engage these guys is to pay them and we do that under Pay Affiliate Commissions here. The easiest way and the way that I do it is with PayPal. So, we’ve got a one-click that goes out to PayPal. So, basically the end of the month, you’ll have your currently due commissions here. So, you can flip through.

Then in the Future Commissions are here too. So these are ones that haven’t triggered yet but are in the system. So, for example, Steve just referred his colleague, but Steve won’t get paid out until another few months. But if I want to pay Steve today, I can. So, I can do that too.

The final portion on the affiliate side and then we’ll get into the marketing side of things, is the affiliate newsletter. So, of course we have all your affiliates in LeadDyno, so you can email them out newsletters from LeadDyno and again this is another one of those things. I’ve never had an affiliate tell me that I communicate with them too much, so I try to do this as often as possible.

A little over a month ago, I was at a trade show and I sent out this email to our affiliates, just kind of a quick hit. Just said, “Hey, I’m at Booth 113, if you want to stop by and also, by the way, I updated your social media and email promos, and you can click here to get the latest into your affiliate dashboard.” We do archive these as well under the Newsletter section of the affiliate dashboard.

“Can an affiliate choose the communications that they receive? For example, if they’re doing 30 transactions a day?”

Yeah, that’s fine. Although we don’t allow them opt out of specific emails. So, an affiliate can opt out, but that will opt them out of all that form of communication. Everything’s got an opt out on it, but it’s a broader opt out. We don’t have that currently. I understand the value in that. We do not have it broken down by list currently.

So, with that let’s jump over to the marketing portion of things. So, this is sort of the cousin of the affiliate link. This is what we call our tracking campaign. This is something that you would use, for example, in a Google Ad, in an email, base marketing app. What we do is we give you a tracking link. So, the same thing as an affiliate link, but instead of have to set up an affiliate, we’re just doing that for you in what we call this Marketing Campaign.

I’m in an ad group. And then where the LeadDyno tracking link will go, if I go to edit my ad. It’s going to go in the Target URL here at the bottom. So, it’s kind of like an old school LeadDyno link. That’s why it’s got a little different format. But the display link is here, so the Google searcher will not see this, but as a target URL, just use the LeadDyno link here.

The advantage of doing this, as you probably know, is that Google Conversion Tracking will just kind of show you if somebody went to a page, it won’t show you much beyond that, but here we’ll show you exactly the number of visits, number of leads, number of purchases that you get from a campaign. And because we’re tied in with the actual sales that are going on, on your web site you get a real accurate read versus Google which is just kind of open.

Then one more question here that is well-timed because we’re going to address that now. Someone is saying, “I used MailChimp for my auto-responder sequences. Is this something that I can do in LeadDyno?”

Actually, it is. So, let me take you over here. This will be the final portion and then we will get into more Q & A. So, to your point, yes. When you signed up with LeadDyno, you probably got this email. Hopefully. Upon sign up, it came from our customer relations manager Adam. This is what the email looked like. So, this email does fire off automatically on sign up and we send on day zero. So, this is for a new lead and then we’ve got this because we have a 14-day free trial we fire these off multiple times within 15 days.

You also have the ability if you’d like to send an email on a new purchase, you can do that here. You can send it after a purchase or you can also send after a cancellation or a refund. And these actually have been very useful emails for us as well because we’re able to close the loop on why people leave. These go out automatically, so we don’t have to remember to send them.

So, auto-responder, if you’re not doing anything today, we do have that available on LeadDyno as well.

Happy to take questions. So, that’s kind of what we had going on the affiliate marketing side and actually first official question in the Q & A here. I see, “Can you show me the InfusionSoft integration?”

I’d be happy to do that. It’s just going to be under settings, Manage Integrations and InfusionSoft is listed right here under CRMs. So, what we have the ability to do with InfusionSoft is we can sync your InfusionSoft purchases, we can also send leads into InfusionSoft and we can also kick action stats within InfusionSoft as well. So, this is where you get that set up, and again if you need a hand you can go ahead and let us know.

“Can I track my organic search traffic with LeadDyno as well?”

Good question. We do track organic search terms. It’s under Analysis and Search Terms here. The only unfortunate development over the last few months is Google has stopped showing, no matter what you’re using, even Google Analytics, they’ve started secure searching a lot of stuff. So, unfortunately, we don’t have visibility into this like we used to. But we capture, if it’s not a secure search, we’ll capture the organic search term and then also the search engine, so you can also see the breakdown in here in terms of the number of visits, the number of leads, the number of purchases.

So, I can look at, for example, I can look at this keyword. Obviously, it’s going to be a good one because people are searching for us by name. But you can see the total number of visits, leads, cancellations. You can also see who those leads are, so if you’re doing a lead follow up in terms of people who came to you but didn’t convert, you can also use that information there as well.

“I assume I can see a similar breakdown by article?”

Yes, so I showed you sort of when we kicked things off, it did show you an article and how that was broken down. So, if I go to refers here, this is going to have basically a list of referring sites that have referred people to your site and is going to have the breakdown. So, that’s going to be a likely saw basically on the Lead page where it’s going to have the full breakdown of people.

So, for example, if I look at this article which has been sending a lot of people to us, I can take a look at it. I can go to the link here. It’s interesting because I can see it sent us a ton of visitors and a large number of leads but not a high number of conversions. So, we see that’s pretty common. It’s kind of common throughout where not all traffic is created equal, so we do give you the breakdown here in terms of what’s actually driving the sales versus what’s not.

“Can you show me your Shopify integration?”

Sure thing. So, it’s going to be under Settings, Manage Integrations. And then to connect with Shopify, it’s going to be under e-commerce services. Shopify is pretty easy. It’s a one-click. You just put in your shop name. Click connect to shop. And again, we can help you with that. If you have a question, we do have a one-click coming very soon for Big Commerce.

They just moved over their API to make it very similar to Shopify, but for the current time, we’re using their legacy connection which takes a few minutes to set up and I always tell people, if you don’t want to deal with it, we’re happy to do it for you because we do these all day. So, can just kind of flip in to your account and get stuff connected up between BigCommerce and LeadDyno.